No president in our nation's history has ever been castigated, condemned, mocked, insulted, derided, and degraded on a scale even close to the constantly ugly attacks on President Obama. From the day he assumed office -- indeed, even before he assumed office -- he was subjected to unprecedented insults in often the most hateful terms.

While Democrats debate the lack of a message and fight over what it should have been, they forget one major point: It is the presidential candidate who sets the party message in presidential election years.

As my daughter and I cut and chopped apples and pureed pumpkin I got to pretend -- for a millisecond -- that my Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell-esqe existence was true ... and that others get to share it, as well. But I know the truth.

More specifically, these five are all psychologically and physically damaged. What Smart is up to is constructing a play -- it's another intermissionless 90-minuter -- in which the impaired gather without realizing they're about to help one another heal.

Elections are moving targets. Nonetheless, absent dramatic irregularities in the election context, polls focused on high visibility races are usually robust predictive tools. Obviously, this was not the case in this year's midterm elections.

President Obama today thanked the American people for "standing up to oppression" by protesting the Columbus Day holiday. He vowed to take aggressive action to "right the wrongs of our current outmoded holiday calendar" as we "embark on a new era of fairness and equality."

Contrary to conventional wisdom, and many polls, Barack Obama is exactly the right kind of pragmatic leader we need to have as President in these scary times. His steadfastness steered the country through the worst recession since the 1930s.

In countless ways, the political force that has arisen on the right has moved this nation toward tyranny and cruelty and serfdom. Why has Liberal America in these times shown so little of the spirit of America's heroic forebears?

Whatever the reasons for Cheney's new mission to blame someone for the mess in Iraq and Syria, one thing is for certain: he won't stop going back in time until he's found all the culprits, including those who are long dead.

We spend a lot of time talking about and waiting for a hero to save America -- the next Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. That's rubbish. The real heroes in America can be found everywhere, right under our noses.

It's like facial recognition technology: if the features match up, you conclude, "It's the same guy." So it is with the match between the force that drove us to Civil War more than a century and a half ago, and the force that has taken over the Republican Party in our times.

A hundred years ago, Martha died. At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, the last individual of a wild blue dove whose flocks once numbered billions and blackened the American skies for days fell over dead in her Cincinnati zoo cage.